The Watching Sky

"Even though these poems are accessible, grounded in both history and geography of place, and steer clear of prosodic calisthenics, they do not presume to think or feel for their readers. There is an open-endedness in both form and content, and a longing for something not quite attained that carries through to the final poem."

-Terry Lucas, author of The Thing Itself

"An authentic voice that makes us all believers. And the breath-grabbing emotionality never tastes saccharine. Rather it's as familiar as the desire we can never shake: to enter a warm home, following a dog with its leash, trailing."

-Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork

"In The Watching Sky, Judy Brackett Crowe examines beauty in the face of mortality, and the sacred imprint of sensory memories. She explores what exists between tangible and abstract with poetic candor: '...she found herself in that cloud-shaped/map again, the colorful world still smelling/of crayon and cedar, of onions and summer.' The poems are full of familiarity, dreaminess, and nostalgia for stories and the myths of common lives. It's Crowe's authentic details that deliver striking vibrancy: '...hair and needles, bark and fur, hooves and arms, /all suspended in ethereal light like floating/constellations, like the end and the beginning.'"

-Kirsten Casey, author of Ex Vivo (out of the living body), Nevada County (CA) Poet Laureate

"In The Watching Sky, landscapes of mind and exterior realities come to life, urban and rural, peopled with often charming populations, such as the storytellers from Ms. Crowe's rural upbringing who have left tales dangling, tantalizing us with the ongoing task poets must take up. The spectrum that unfolds here is ambitious in the best sense-from childhood, family, society, and mankind's effect on the natural world that includes its greedy and suicidal tromping over the human soul and our most sensitive selves. In this sense the poet has not given up. She stands against the dulling and dumbing down of the world for the life that's in us and around us. So it is an embattled voice that rings out in the book, a challenge to feel and act with awareness and delight."

-Gene Berson, author of Raveling Travel

"In The Watching Sky, we stroll through Judy Brackett Crowe's poems like the landscapes of her 'immense, cloud-shaped world, ' in awe of what is noticed and captured in every rich detail of Earth's beautifully relentless lessons on life and death, shadow and light, and where we find home. Whether it is in reflections of 'cello sounds and jasmine air, ' a little girl hopscotching all the way home, of once being a bird 'when the world was young..., ' or even beyond the sky into the 'fall-off places' that are full of burning wonder-over each creek and mountain, and under every moon-washed sky, we revel in Crowe's exquisite affirmations of finding home in nature's every wingbeat."

-Julie Valin, author of Songs for Ghosts